The blog CarnotCycle, which tries to explain thermodynamics — a noble goal, since thermodynamics is a really big, really important, and criminally unpopularized part of science and mathematics — here starts from an “Unpublished Fragment” by the great Josiah Willard Gibbs to talk about entropy.
Gibbs — a strong candidate for the greatest scientist the United States ever produced, complete with fascinating biographical quirks to make him seem accessibly peculiar — gave to statistical mechanics much of the mathematical form and power that it now has. Gibbs had planned to write something about “On entropy as mixed-up-ness”, which certainly puts in one word what people think of entropy as being. The concept is more powerful and more subtle than that, though, and CarnotCycle talks about some of the subtleties.
Tucked away at the back of Volume One of The Scientific Papers of J. Willard Gibbs, is a brief chapter headed ‘Unpublished Fragments’. It contains a list of nine subject headings for a supplement that Professor Gibbs was planning to write to his famous paper “On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances”. Sadly, he completed his notes for only two subjects before his death in April 1903, so we will never know what he had in mind to write about the sixth subject in the list: On entropy as mixed-up-ness.
Mixed-up-ness. It’s a catchy phrase, with an easy-to-grasp quality that brings entropy within the compass of minds less given to abstraction. That’s no bad thing, but without Gibbs’ guidance as to exactly what he meant by it, mixed-up-ness has taken on a life of its own and has led to entropy acquiring the derivative associations of chaos and disorder…
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